Learning or Working at different paces?

Much of the discussion of the benefits of blended and self paced/mastery learning comes from an assumption the biggest factor that limits students' ability to succeed is that each student learns at a different pace and learns best in different ways.

There's no doubt that there is some truth in this, but from what I've seen, the single most important factor that affects students' ability to succeed is not that they learn at different paces, but that they work at different paces. In other words, the level of effort put forth seems to make the most difference. If a student doesn't work hard enough, there are most likely going to be problems no matter what type of instruction is provided. Moreover, slowing down the pace (through self pacing) for some of these students has not seemed to help, but rather to enable them to fall further and further behind. It seems like they work harder when we all move together at the same pace.

While there are definitely benefits to self paced and blended learning, the challenges should not be ignored. One of the biggest challenges is that slowing down (through self pacing) for a student who is working hard but needs extra help is useful, but slowing down (through self pacing) for a student that is not working hard enough is actually harmful.

Practice Problems on Khan

One type of homework I assign is to do certain practice problem sets on Khan Academy.  From September - November I was having difficulty motivating the students to do enough problems to understand the concept completely.  For example, I would assign ten problems for completion points.  Most students would complete their ten problems (some would only spend seconds on a problem) but it wouldn’t matter to them if they got them correct or not.  Therefore, the student wasn’t receiving a full understanding of the material.

In December, I changed the requirement.  I assigned a minimum of ten problems but I took the ten problems for a percent grade. In addition, I allowed students to do more than ten to raise their grade.   This changed the student attitude completely.  Most students now complete as many problems as he/she needs individually to understand the type of problem being presented.  Some students will get the first ten correct and be finished.  Others, now spend the time they need to be prepared for class the next day.

In conclusion, I have found students seem to be motivated by the grade more than anything else.